Abstract
The Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) is a standard model for controlled vocabularies on the Web. However, SKOS vocabularies often differ in terms of quality, which reduces their applicability across system boundaries. Here we investigate how we can support taxonomists in improving SKOS vocabularies by pointing out quality issues that go beyond the integrity constraints defined in the SKOS specification. We identified potential quantifiable quality issues and formalized them into computable quality checking functions that can find affected resources in a given SKOS vocabulary. We implemented these functions in the qSKOS quality assessment tool, analyzed 15 existing vocabularies, and found possible quality issues in all of them.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
ISO 25964-1: Information and documentation – Thesauri and interoperability with other vocabularies – Part 1: Thesauri for information retrieval. Norm, International Organization for Standardization (2011)
Aitchison, J., Gilchrist, A., Bawden, D.: Thesaurus construction and use: a practical manual. Aslib IMI (2000)
Allemang, D., Hendler, J.: Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL. Morgan Kaufmann (2011)
Batini, C., Cappiello, C., Francalanci, C., Maurino, A.: Methodologies for data quality assessment and improvement. ACM Computing Surveys 41(3), 16 (2009)
de Coronado, S., Wright, L.W., Fragoso, G., Haber, M.W., Hahn-Dantona, E.A., Hartel, F.W., Quan, S.L., Safran, T., Thomas, N., Whiteman, L.: The NCI Thesaurus quality assurance life cycle. J. Biomed. Inform. 42(3), 530–539 (2009)
Harpring, P.: Introduction to Controlled Vocabularies: Terminology for Art, Architecture, and Other Cultural Works. Getty Publications, Los Angeles (2010)
Heath, T., Bizer, C.: Linked Data: Evolving the Web into a Global Data Space. Morgan & Claypool (2011), http://linkeddatabook.com/
Hedden, H.: The accidental taxonomist. Information Today (2010)
Hogan, A., Harth, A., Passant, A., Decker, S., Polleres, A.: Weaving the pedantic web. In: Proc. WWW 2010 Workshop on Linked Data on the Web, LDOW (2010)
Hopcroft, J.E., Tarjan, R.E.: Algorithm 447: efficient algorithms for graph manipulation. Commun. ACM 16(6), 372–378 (1973)
Isaac, A., Summers, E.: SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Primer. Working Group Note, W3C (2009), http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-primer/
Kless, D., Milton, S.: Towards quality measures for evaluating thesauri. Metadata and Semantic Research, 312–319 (2010)
Miles, A., Bechhofer, S.: SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization System Reference, W3C Recommendation (2009), http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/
Nagy, H., Pellegrini, T., Mader, C.: Exploring structural differences in thesauri for SKOS-based applications. In: I-Semantics 2011, pp. 187–190. ACM (2011)
NISO: ANSI/NISO Z39.19 - Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies (2005)
Pipino, L., Lee, Y., Wang, R.: Data quality assessment. Commun. ACM 45(4), 211–218 (2002)
Popitsch, N.P., Haslhofer, B.: DSNotify: handling broken links in the web of data. In: Proc. 19th Int. Conf. World Wide Web, WWW 2010, pp. 761–770 (2010)
Soergel, D.: Thesauri and ontologies in digital libraries: tutorial. In: Proc. 2nd Joint Conf. on Digital libraries, JCDL (2002)
Spero, S.: LCSH is to Thesaurus as Doorbell is to Mammal: Visualizing Structural Problems in the Library of Congress Subject Headings. In: Proc. Int. Conf. on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, DC (2008)
Svenonius, E.: Definitional approaches in the design of classification and thesauri and their implications for retrieval and for automatic classification. In: Proc. Int. Study Conference on Classification Research, pp. 12–16 (1997)
Svenonius, E.: Design of controlled vocabularies. Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science 45, 822–838 (2003)
van Assem, M., Malaisé, V., Miles, A., Schreiber, G.: A Method to Convert Thesauri to SKOS. In: Sure, Y., Domingue, J. (eds.) ESWC 2006. LNCS, vol. 4011, pp. 95–109. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Vrandecic, D.: Ontology Evaluation. Ph.D. thesis, KIT, Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Karlsruhe (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Mader, C., Haslhofer, B., Isaac, A. (2012). Finding Quality Issues in SKOS Vocabularies. In: Zaphiris, P., Buchanan, G., Rasmussen, E., Loizides, F. (eds) Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries. TPDL 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7489. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33290-6_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33290-6_25
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-33289-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-33290-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)